


What's up with Slash?

by Blumenstern



Category: Fandom - Fandom, Free!, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Naruto
Genre: Essays, Femslash, Gen, Het, Male Slash, Meta, Slash, gen - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-07
Updated: 2015-12-07
Packaged: 2018-05-05 13:06:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5376287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blumenstern/pseuds/Blumenstern
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My thoughts on the dominance of slash fanfics on Ao3 and popular theories about the origins/cause of that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What's up with Slash?

The memory of my first encounter with fan fiction roughly 7-9 years ago is somewhat of a distant, hazy one. If I do remember correctly, my just-arrived-in-puberty self was looking for forums to discuss my recently discovered first „ship“, Naruto x Sakura, which had developed from probably reading way too much into their interactions at the beginning of the (German version of the) Naruto Shippuden anime.  
  
While searching what I think was the German version of the Naruto forums, I discovered a story about Naruto and Sakura having to secretly marry while Sakura was actually in love with Sasuke etc., you can probably guess where this is going. While I can't remember if it was actually good or not (considering that back then I thought that Eragon was the best thing since Lord of the Rings), I was hooked and quickly started looking for more and found the German archive fanfiktion.de, where I finally had my first experience with Slash, which promptly led to a sexual identity crisis since I was a 12-13 year old boy who had just discovered that he liked to read stories about two guys (Naruto and Sasuke, in case you were wondering) having sex.  
  
I spent around 2 years reading both het and slash, and then a few years not reading any fan fiction at all, and when I “returned” to fan fiction, I was almost 18 with a completely different mindset than when I first started reading it. While I was “gone”, I had started to consume most media in English instead of the German translation/dubs (or Japanese with English subtitles for anime) and so my reading of fan fiction followed suit, first on ff.net and later Ao3.  
  
That was the time when I fully realized just how much Slash there is in comparison to everything else (it was about 70% of the entire Ao3 archive last time I looked, a crazy amount compared to the less than 5% for Femslash), and also how nonsensical, unrealistic and cliché-riddled a lot of it was, like the whole uke/seme thing or the complete lack of protection and/or lubrication (I found the ones which actually used the blood from completely unprepared “entry” as lubrication to be the most jarring example), or the implicit assumption that being gay makes men act like like women (and not modern or just realistic women, more like the 1950s Reed Richards “wives are for kissing, not talking” damsel-in-distress approach).  
  
It's not like I think all slash is bad, but more like I get the impression that the bad ones make up a far higher percentage compared to gen/het/femslash (or maybe the bad ones are just more popular here than elsewhere) and I don't understand why that's the case (if really it is and I'm not just weirdly biased against it for some reason).  
  
I know the common explanations like the “It's all 13-year-old girls without any knowledge about gay people and/or gay sex” one, but it's not like anyone did a proper study on that (right?).  
In fact I'm kind of sitting in a glass house throwing stones (German saying, can't remember if it exists in English as well) considering I'm not a good writer myself, it just feels so weird to me that I like the majority of the popular het/gen/femslash stories while many of the popular slash ones just make me cringe.  
Of course, a big part of it may be the intended audience of a particular work, e.g. Naruto/Supernatural/Harry Potter/Teen Wolf etc. being aimed at teenagers rather than adults, but so is Once Upon a Time (at least as far as I know) and I don't see nearly as much bad Femslash there as bad Slash in other Fandoms (again, that might be personal bias), so I'm no sure I really buy into that explanation. It's not like teenagers have a monopoly on bad writing, both Twilight and Shades were written by adults and I didn't think either was well written.  
  
Another explanation I hear rather often is the “It's all straight women writing gay porn like how all men watch lesbian porn” one, which also doesn't quite make much sense to me. I remember someone on Ao3 actually did a study on gender and sexual orientation of fan fiction writers, which (if I remember correctly) said that while 80% of writers identified as female (the other 20% being male or non-binary-conforming people), the majority of female writers identified as not straight, namely lesbian/bisexual/pansexual/asexual/... (it had options for almost all orientations I know of), though I don't know how representative that study really is.  
  
There are plenty of other explanations, so at least I'm not the only one who feels that way about slash, but none of them are really provable, so I guess there isn't much use debating every single one of them.  
  
In the end, after writing all of this down I'm still not any closer to figuring it out, but I just had to get it off my chest.  
I do like some slash as long as I feel like the relationship has some basis in canon (like Naruto and Sasuke having all that UST, Harry and Draco stalking each other in almost every book, all those movies/shows featuring extreme amounts of bromance or just about everything that happens in FREE!) and the characters aren't acting completely Ooc (again, the whole uke thing), but it feels like a chore trying to find the rare gems instead of being fun and exciting.  
  
So, what do you think (if anyone actually read this)?  
Do you like slash? Why/why not?  
Does anyone know why it's so popular?  
Find out in the next episode of Drag... wait wrong show.  
Bye! 


End file.
